Data mining from 1994 to 2004: An application-orientated review

Data mining, which is also known as knowledge discovery, is one of the most popular topics in information technology. It concerns the process of automatically extracting useful information and has the promise of discovering hidden relationships that exist in large databases. These relationships represent valuable knowledge that is crucial for many applications. This paper presents a review of works on current applications of data mining, which focus on four main application areas, including bioinformatics data, information retrieval, adaptive hypermedia, and electronic commerce. How data mining can enhance functions for these four areas is described. The reader of this paper is expected to get an overview of the state-of-the-art research associated with these applications. Furthermore, we identify the limitations of current works and raise several directions for future research.